After having read the article El fin de las vacaciones – Listening and reading and listened to the monologue “El fin de las vacaciones” and its list of vocabulary, you can find below some grammar explanations and notes. As you can see below, the text has been divided and lines have been assigned a number, to find words easily.

Grammar Point: Spanish Definite and Indefinite ArticlesAll lines, except line No. 1, have some words in red. All those words are definite articles. And all of them correspond to the English definite article “the”.

But, how is that possible? Several Spanish words correspond to just one English word? Yes. The reason for that is the gender (masculine and feminine) of Spanish words. If the word (noun) the Spanish article is preceding is masculine, we’ll use the corresponding masculine article. And same for the feminine.

Look at this table:

SPANISH DEFINITE ARTICLES

(English “the”)

Masculine

Feminine

Singular

el

la

Plural

los

las

So, for example, let’s take a look at line number 2: 2“Y el verano termina. El verano se va.”

The substantive (noun) “verano” (“summer”) is a masculine, singular noun in Spanish. That’s why the article preceding “verano” is “el”. Imagine we change this sentence to plural:

“Y los veranos terminan. Los veranos se van.”

Here, we can see the singular article “el” has changed to “los”, as “veranos” is now a masculine, plural noun. You can also notice there are more changes: “verano” ends in “-s” for the plural. Also, the verb “termina” in singular, changes to its plural: “terminan”.

Apart from the definite articles, there is another classification: Indefinite articles.

SPANISH INDEFINITE ARTICLES

Masculine

Feminine

Singular (English “a”)

un

una

Plural (English “some”)

unos

unas

The only sentence in the text containing an indefinite article (in green) is line number 10:

10“(…). El otoño también es una estación bonita. ¿Por qué no?”

“Una” is a feminine, singular indefinite article. It is feminine because the noun “estación” is feminine. The plural of “una estación” is “unas estaciónes”.